Just from my reading of the UPI story, no further googling... A professor is teaching a course in intercultural communication.. In other words exploring the difficulties members of one culture have in understanding and communicating with those in an other culture. What might be useful to do is to try to see how "they" experience what "we" do to help us gain some insight into why "they" react the way "they" do. For instance why do Muslims get so furious if "we" happen to print a cartoon about Allah or defile a Koran. Why don't "they" just accept that it is just a book or a cartoon and get on with their life?
Here we have a strict adherent Christian who is angered by an exercise which seems to attack his faith. Note that others in the same classroom chose not to do the exercise and seemingly without consequences. Only this student as far as reported felt the need to go to the supervisor and complain that his faith was being attacked. Sounds to me like the exercise hit a nerve, which should be the goal of the exercise. So now that student and other students have a bit of the sense of anger that Muslims feel when the tenets of their faith are ridiculed. And that some would see this as an attack on Christianity, knee jerk defending of the faith, only shows that maybe we all need to learn to be more interculturally sensitive so we don't jump to wrong conclusions before getting facts.
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